


Another Ghost In This Town

by limerental



Series: Farm Verse [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Erotic Grass Cutting, Farmer Thor, Fat Thor, First Kiss, Fix-It, M/M, No fat shaming here, Pining, Poltergeist Loki, Post-Endgame
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-03
Updated: 2019-07-03
Packaged: 2020-06-03 03:32:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19455457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/limerental/pseuds/limerental
Summary: After the defeat of Thanos, Thor retires to a farmhouse on a hill. His true reason for doing so may or may not have something to do with the wiley poltergeist that has been haunting the farmhouse for the past year.





	Another Ghost In This Town

A stranger moves into the ramshackle farmhouse on the hill.

One evening, he rumbles up the rutted drive in a dusty pickup and stands for a long time in the wind-swept yard with his hands on his hips, just looking. 

The house is three stories of peeling wallpaper and weathered clapboard. The shutters hang crooked, the roof is a patchwork of missing shingles, and the yard and orchard and fields that sweep away toward the distant wood are overgrown nearly waist-high.

The stranger looks at the farmhouse, and the farmhouse looks back.

Loki peers down through the cracked attic window as the man crosses the yard to lean on the pasture fence. He is a large man with a sizeable gut and broad shoulders that round out his flannel shirt. His beard is neatly combed and his blond hair held loosely in a bun at the nape of his neck.

He leans for a long time looking out at the fields, elbows pressed into the worn wood, face obscured by the distance. Dusk creeps in, tinging the landscape blue, and the bats start to wake in the attic, chittering amongst themselves.

Loki watches until the dark obscures the stranger at the fenceline. There is something different about this tenant, certainly. Though what it is, he cannot say. 

“Nevermind that,” Loki says, perhaps to the bats that have begun swooping out from the eaves into the night or to the house itself. “We'll have some fun with this one.”

*

Loki has been here as long as he can remember, haunting the farmhouse on the hill.

The tenants blur together, never staying long.

To amuse himself, he plays little tricks on them here and there. Letting them think an object has gone missing only to allow it to appear right in the open. Turning the occasional piece of furniture upside down. Vanishing all of the toilet paper.

There's the elderly woman who makes one too many uncouth comments to the immigrant she hires to mow the lawn. She was ancient, and her heart would have certainly given out soon enough if Loki hadn't helped it along.

There's the lawyer from the next town over who buys the farm so he has a place to get blind drunk and shoot cans on the weekends and bring over women that his wife doesn't know about. Loki turns a blind eye to his infidelity until one woman sobers up and starts to protest, and the lawyer grabs her by the hair, meaning to make her stay. 

Loki sends him howling out of the house with his pants around his ankles.

There's the real estate agent who means to turn the farm into a hotel or an outlet mall or some other monstrosity. A series of unfortunate mishaps during the initial surveying means those plans don't stick.

There's a guy whose only visitors are patrons buying drugs, which wouldn't bother Loki except he keeps a pair of boisterous dogs who bay and strain at their leashes whenever Loki is nearby. He tolerates the disturbance to his peaceful afterlife until the man takes to beating them quiet. It's not too long after that that the drug dealer sprints off the property on foot to never return, his own dogs nipping at his heels.

There's a family who moves in, two little boys and a young mother and a father who wants to raise beef cattle. The boys run out in the woods all day, playing Poohsticks on the bridge over the creek or building elaborate forts out of downed limbs. Sometimes they try to hide when their father's truck lurches up the drive after being at the bar all afternoon, but he always finds them in the brush and drags them squealing into the house for supper.

Loki watches each night from a shadowed corner in the boys' room as they sleep curled together on their little bed. Something nostalgic pulls at his gut.

One night, they are already in bed when the father jerks the truck to a stop in the drive. He shuffles through the cracked bedroom door, fumbles in the dark for the boys. His hands wander. The boys blink wide-eyed and confused, and the little one begins to cry.

Loki rages.

In the morning, the truck sits burnt to cinders in the yard, the shutters all blown off, every window cracked, and the mother has taken the boys and gone to live with her sister, far away from their careless drunk of a father.

Mostly, the house stands empty and gathers dust. The wind blows the shingles into the lawn , and the weeds grow up around the path. The front porch warps, and critters take up in the walls.

When the stranger comes, the house has sat gathering dust for a month or two. He moves in without a fuss, bringing no belongings. He snores in the ragged armchair the last tenant left behind and drives into town for meals.

He spends most of his time sitting in silence, either in the armchair or on the sagging front porch. He seems to have no friends or family and no occupation.

Loki has the distinct feeling that he is waiting for something. Or perhaps someone.

Whatever it is he's waiting for, it's slow to come. Loki bides his time, watching him interact with the locals and go about his day, learning the things that make the stranger tic. 

He is a large man in most ways, with a loud laugh and cocky swagger but also a gentleness in the way he speaks to others, knowing just the right thing to say in most situations. Quick to express gratitude, the first to lend a hand, warmly diplomatic in every interaction. He seems all at once dumb as a brick and sharper than most give him credit for, playing at being stupid more often than not. 

It's clear he was someone important once. He speaks strangely and tells stories of great battles and distant lands, and a melancholy slips into his voice when he does so. 

When he smiles, it does not reach his eyes.

The pranks and little tricks that are Loki's specialty can wait, he thinks, at least for a little while. Most of the others quickly gave him reason to mess with them, whether they were unkind or annoying or simply bored him, but this man has yet to inspire so much as a silly joke.

So the poltergeist stays his haunting for the time being.

*

The townsfolk recognize the stranger when he comes. The man from New York, the man from Sokovia, from Wakanda.

Even in a town this small, there are people they lost in a puff of smoke, blown like dust and then years later, found again, and they know that this man was a part of it somehow, some kind of hero. 

While the cities fell into disarray, the Rapture and the five years following didn't change this place too much. The vacant houses and empty storefronts were already commonplace, and after their loved ones filtered back into the world, it was straight to business as usual.

The townsfolk warn him. They say, buddy, that house up there ain't kept an owner for more than a month in the past year. Some kind of devil live up there.

Thor thanks them for the warning and smiles a sad smile.

Tammy, who owns the local diner, gives him her famous strawberry pie on the house. She lost her daughter to the Rapture and her ex-husband. Her young waitress, Rosie, bats her big, dark eyes likes she's some coy thing, hoping he takes notice. She lost both sisters and a boyfriend in Tallahassee (though the boyfriend didn't last a week reunited).

“In my dreams of late,” he tells Rosie, smearing whipped cream on his plate with a fork. “I see my brother in that house, though my brother died almost six years ago now.”

“Oh?” She leans forward on the counter and dips her head to look through her eyelashes. “What's he doing in the dreams?”

“Watching usually,” he says. “Staring out the windows.”

“Sounds pretty weird.”

“Yes, I thought so,” Thor says, gesturing at her with his fork. “I am sorry to have interrupted the travels I was on, but the Norns must have some reason that I should see him in dreams.”

“Travels?”

“Yes, travels in space. Have I told you that I'm a Guardian of the Galaxy?”

“You might've said.”

“I was very briefly King of the Nine Realms as well,” Thor says. “Though we won't talk about that. Bad memories.”

“Sure thing.”

“So I returned to Earth, and the house truly does exist, just as I dreamt it.”

“Brother and all?”

“I don't know,” Thor says. “Do you believe it's possible? That he could be there?”

“Well, mister, I don't know much about any of that,” Rosie says, leaning to dip her finger in his smear of whipped cream and pop it in her mouth. “If you'd asked me that question last year, I would have told you somethin' different. But now I know for a fact that the dead don't always stay dead.”

“You're more right than you know,” he says. He leaves her a generous tip and drives back up to the farmhouse on the hill, where he finds himself alone again.

Or perhaps not.

*

The townsfolk soon lose their awe and hushed reverence of Thor, especially once they learn he doesn't even own a riding mower or have any usable furniture in the farmhouse except a single, moth-eaten armchair.

A gaggle of them show up one morning with a few truck beds full of secondhand furniture and home fixings, from a kitchen table with mismatched chairs to some truly ugly lamps. The gathered townsfolk go bug-eyed as Thor lifts a sagging couch in one arm and a mattress in the other.

The women hang the curtains and tsk over the grimey layer of dust over everything, while the men gesticulate over the farm equipment they've brought.

“So this device?” Thor asks, holding aloft a weedwhacker. “Where does it digest the weeds it eats?”

Loki, meanwhile, hovers amidst the bustling activity, invisible. Nothing like this has ever gone on in this house. The townsfolk have mostly been too afraid to come near the farmhouse on the hill, and though he sees the occasional nervous flicker of the eyes, something about Thor's presence seems to put them at ease.

He frowns at the floral chiffon curtains and old gingham couch and frilly lampshades. If he knew the stranger was going to turn this house into an appalling interior decorating disaster, he would have scared him out on the very first day.

As it is, he settles on waiting until they all go out front again to tip one of the hideous lamps to the floor with a crash. Some things just can't be tolerated.

Out in the yard, Thor pulls a long-handled, curved scythe from between the other more high tech farm equipment. 

“Now that's more like it,” he laughs, admiring the honed edge and dark patina of the blade. “This is a suitable weapon for my purposes.”

After the last well wishes and hearty congratulations, the caravan rumbles away down the drive, leaving Thor with a few weeks full of casseroles and other homemade delicacies. He stands a while on the porch, Loki close by him, watching, and then he steps carefully over the cracked front step into the yard, grabbing the scythe from where it leans against the railing.

He rolls his shoulders and adjusts his grip on the handle.

“Prepare yourself, weeds,” he says. “You are no match for the Mighty Thor.”

Thor begins to sweep the scythe through the overgrown yard, back and forth, back and forth. His broad shoulders and arms bunch and flex, and under the noonday sun, sweat soon soaks his white shirt transparent and slicks stray hairs to his temples. Beneath the soft paunch of his belly and thick thighs, he hides a tremendous strength.

Loki stands on the shaded porch, fingers to his lips. He can feel only an echo of the cool shade, can smell just a hint of fresh-hewn grass and, perhaps his imagination, the faint musky scent of Thor's sweat.

Thor curves a wide arc across the front yard, a smooth lawn slowly appearing behind him as he works. He seems not to tire, despite the weight of the scythe and how strenuous the work must be. To his knowledge, Loki has never done any such work, but he assumes it must be strenuous. 

It's certainly strenuous enough just watching as his back muscles jump and twitch, his meaty calves and thighs tighten, his big shoulders roll. His shirt clings to his chest and the round of his stomach. Yes, it is very hard work indeed.

He moves onto the orchard, careful of the trunks and sprawling roots. He doesn't rest, even as the sun blazes through the trees, casting dappled shade on his bent back. It seems like no time at all has passed when he finishes his last sweep, leaning his scythe against a tree and coming back across the yard scooping up huge armfuls of hewn grass and weeds.

When he finally comes back up on the porch and leans on the railing to look out at his finished work, his white shirt is stained green and there is red dirt smeared on his face. Damp strings of hair hang down across his forehead, and he sweeps them back, strained bicep twitching as he does so. Loki's fingers twitch.

Thor goes into the house and pours himself a glass of water at the sink, the well clanking a bit before the ice cold water streams out. He sits down in his newly acquired rocking chair, and the condensation from the glass slips in slow rivulets down his brown forearms as he drinks. 

Loki half expects his very dead, dusty heart to leap back to life in his ribcage at any moment only to immediately arrest.

Nothing happens, and the stranger just sits. He looks pleased with himself and his work, though his gaze is somewhere more distant than the orchard and sweeping pastures beyond. A cool breeze slips off the fields and ruffles his drying hair. Loki barely feels it at all. 

More than he has in a long time, he finds that he wishes to.

*

It's not long until Thor again dreams of Loki.

For a moment, he believes something has simply woken him in the night, but his eyes soon adjust to the dark to see that the living room is empty. No gaudy lamps or couch or signs of Thor living there. An orange moon rises outside, spilling light onto the floorboards.

Loki stands in shadow between the front windows, watching.

“I feared I wouldn't see you again,” he says to the specter. “That if I sought you too earnestly, you would slip away and not reappear.”

Loki says nothing.

“But this farmhouse exists. I saw this place in dreams and have now seen it in reality.” The moonlight seems to slant toward him, and he cannot quite see Loki's face. “That has to mean something.”

“Or it's just a house on a hill,” Loki says, stepping into the orange light. His eyes are still lost in shadow, his mouth pressed in a grimace. He looks just as he did on the Statesman with a bank of stars behind him, his complexion grey, his dark hair hanging limp on his narrow shoulders.

“A haunted house on a hill.”

“So they say.”

“They say everyone who lived here didn't remain more than a month.”

“They do say that, yes.”

“And that a specter drove them out. Some even to death.”

“Only the one death. She deserved it anyhow.”

“You don't deny it?” Thor asks. He finds it has become hard to look at Loki. He blurs, the moonlight too bright, the landscape spinning beyond the windows.

“This is just a dream, Thor,” he says. The room spins and quakes. He finds he can't catch his balance and Loki stretches away from him like he's at the wrong end of a telescope. He turns his back.

“Don't go,” Thor says.

But he does, shivering with green light, and then the room itself disintegrates and blows away like dust.

Thor wakes in his armchair in the living room cluttered with tacky furniture, the night sky outside the cracked front windows dark and still.

*

Loki soon learns that Thor is not without friends or loved ones as he'd first assumed. He's just been doing his darndest to blow them all off. Within the first few weeks in the house, they show up one after another to check in on him. All with flimsy excuses of being somewhere nearby and just happening to have time to swing over for a chat.

“I'm going to a cellular conference not far from here,” Banner says, huge green arms folded across his chest. He fills up a whole corner of the living room, opting to stand rather than risk collapsing Thor's lopsided couch. “What are you doing out here, Thor?”

“I run a farm now. I'm a farmer.”

“I can see that,” Banner says. “This got anything to do with Thanos?”

“I don't know what you mean.”

“You know, the guy who settled down on a farm after wiping out half the universe?”

“He perished there at my hand, yes.”

“Well, yeah. But you went a little off the rails there afterward.”

“This has nothing to do with Thanos. I am perfectly on the rails.”

“You sober?”

“Haven't had a drink since I left New Asgard a year ago.”

“Good, good.”

“I even style my beard sometimes now, see?” He points at the braid jutting down from his chin.

“Looks great, buddy,” Banner says. “You sure you're doing ok?”

“Never better!” Thor says. “But really, you don't need to worry. Did have a rough patch there, but I'm much better now. Thank you for your concern.” He leans back in his armchair. “Though I still don't get the whole Hulky Banner thing, it's weirding me out.”

And so Banner bids him goodbye with a promise to keep in touch. 

Next to arrive is a slim woman with dark hair and glasses who arrives in a jeep whirring with scientific instruments.

“I'm going to a gravity conference not far from here,” Darcy says after being released from the hug Thor swept her into immediately.

“That's not a real event.”

“Oh yeah, it's a big deal in the uhh... science community. Huge. Lots of grave questions about gravity,” she says.

“Uh-huh,” Thor says. “You here to ask me if I'm experiencing a mental break?”

“Yeah, actually,” she says. “Do I have to call Jane? Is it super serious?”

“No, I am not having a mental break. I'm a farmer now. I farm.”

“Farm what?”

“You know, the usual.”

“Right, ok,” she says. They go into the farmhouse together, and Darcy looks around and wrinkles her nose at the mismatched furniture, the cobwebbed ceilings, the peeling paint. “Haven't you ever been in a functional house? Like, ever?”

“It serves its purpose,” he says. “I don't require much.”

Darcy peeks into the grimy bathroom down the hall.

“You fucking shit here? Are you serious?”

“There's an outbuilding for such purposes.”

“No wonder Jane broke up with you.” She realizes she's said the wrong thing a second later when Thor's face changes. “Sorry,” she says, but Thor waves away the apology.

“It's not your fault,” he says. “I handled things very poorly there for a while. Jane was right to distance herself from me.”

“Hey, you got dealt a really shitty hand. I think the best of us would have reacted the same way or worse.”

“Maybe,” Thor says, though it's clear in his voice that he doesn't believe it.

“Well seems like you're doing better, at least,” Darcy says. “Now tell me about the farm plans. Where's a good place to eat around here?”

And so Thor brings her to the diner for a slice or two of pie, and then she's back on the road to her supposed conference.

Valkyrie swoops down out of the sky on a winged horse and lands with a dramatic flourish in the front yard.

“I was just nearby at a-- you know what, no, I'm here to knock some sense into you,” she says. “And what in all the realms combined are you wearing?”

Thor is on the front porch in a rocking chair, bare feet up on the railing, wearing frayed cut off jeans that stop mid-thigh and a John Deere t-shirt a size too small that has hitched up over the round of his stomach. Dark sunglasses conceal his eyes, and his hair is in a loose, single braid slung over one shoulder. He holds a glass of lemonade in one hand and a half-eaten homemade pickle in the other. There is pickle juice dribbled down his beard.

Thor doesn't respond.

“Thor,” Valkyrie says, her winged mount pawing at the red dirt. “Thor, are you seriously asleep? Thor!”

He jerks awake, sloshing his lemonade and dropping his pickle to the dusty floorboards.

“Wuzzat-- huh?” He grunts, pushing his sunglasses onto the top of his head to look at Valkyrie in the yard and then down at his fallen pickle. With a shrug, he bends to scoop it back up. “What were you saying? I must have dozed off.”

“I said I'm here to knock some sense into you,” Valkyrie says. “And I was questioning your fashion choices.”

Thor looks down at himself and tugs his shirt back over his belly, though it soon rides up again. “The locals have been very kind to me,” he says. “They came bearing clothing and furniture and delicious brined vegetables.” He seems to notice he is still holding a glass of lemonade and gestures at her with it. “Also, this juice is incredible. How did they create the perfect blend of sour and sweet? Confounding.”

“Are you drunk?”

“Come on, Valkyrie, you've seen me drunk,” he says. “I'm simply enjoying my retirement.”

“Your retirement... as a farmer?”

“Yes, I'm thinking of acquiring some livestock soon,” he says as her winged horse snorts and stretches. “Though come to think of it, I don't know what Midgard has in the way of livestock. Do any of them have wings? Maybe cool horns?”

“Why are you really here, Thor?”

“I see you're keeping Stormbreaker safe,” he says of the weapon strapped to her back. “Perhaps I should forge a hoe in the heart of a dying star.”

“Quit deflecting,” Valkyrie says. “Answer the question.”

“I'm here for some peace and quiet,” he says. “You're welcome to join me for dinner. I have casserole.”

“You're really serious about this?”

“Yes, the casserole won't take long to heat up. One of them has some odd vegetables in it but--”

“I mean about retirement.”

“No more adventures,” he says. “No more saving the world. This farm is my only responsibility now.”

“But are you happy?”

“No, not really,” Thor says with firm honesty, though he smiles anyway. “I'm not the same person I was when we met on Sakaar. There are some things one can't ever get back.”

“I think we both know you're hoping you're wrong about that.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” he says, though a glint in his eye betrays the grief behind his cheesy smile. He and Valkyrie share the last of the pitcher of lemonade and reheat some casserole, watching her horse graze in the verdant pasture. 

Before she leaves after dinner, she claps a firm hand on his shoulder and grips Stormbreaker's handle.

“I'll have this waiting for you,” she says. “And there's still a cabin in New Asgard empty if you change your mind.”

“Thank you,” he says.

“Also,” she hesitates with a drawn out sigh. “Korg wants to know why you haven't been online.” 

“Yes, well, you can tell him that unless they invent some kind of... farming video game that I'm unlikely to return to the online world,” he says. “Which doesn't sound likely, now does it?”

Valkryie rubs at the bridge of her nose, holding back a smile.

“Don't do anything stupid,” she says and leaps onto her mount to take to the skies.

And down from the skies not long later sinks a rustbucket of a spaceship, piloted by a misfit crew that Thor greets with hearty guffawing and a giant bear hug each.

“Wow,” Quill says as he is released from the hug, holding Thor at a distance so he can look at him. “They said you'd gone full hillbilly, but I didn't really believe them.”

“I do live on a hill now,” Thor says.

“Who is this Billy you speak of?” Drax asks. “Also, I like your tiny pants.”

“They're quite comfortable and give me a far wider range of motion,” Thor boasts, bending forward into a lunge.

“Oh,” Mantis says with a twitch of her antenna. “This is what is meant by thunder thighs, no?”

“I am Groot,” Groot says, and Rocket points a warning finger at him.

Gamora huffs, standing a bit away from the group with her arms crossed. “We're wasting time here,” she says. “My father never rested in destroying the galaxy, and we shouldn't rest in restoring it. Nebula's waiting.”

“Come on, Gamora,” Quill says. “It's Thor! Remember what we've been saying about friendship?” She bats away his attempt at a friendly shoulderbump. “Hey, you didn't stab me that time, that's progress.”

“Friendship is the glue that will repair any broken situation,” Mantis pipes up. Gamora rolls her eyes.

“The glue is not real,” Drax supplies helpfully. 

“Right yeah, anyone puts anything sticky in my fur ever again and they go out an airlock,” Rocket says.

“I missed you guys,” Thor says with a sniffle, a glint of tears in his eyes. After another round of crushing bear hugs, Thor goes into the house and brings out an assortment of baked goods for them to share on a picnic blanket in the shade of the orchard. Gamora and Quill bicker on and off, Mantis nibbles happily at a single oatmeal cookie while Drax shoves as much as he can into his mouth, and Groot keeps nabbing extras with not so subtle tendrils. 

Through the interactions with his fellows, Loki watches with silent fascination. Who is this man really? 

There is something unspoken in every conversation, but most of his friends don't ask the right questions, don't push hard enough.

In the orchard, Rocket and Thor leave the others to walk out along the pasture fence.

“Still having those dreams, kid?” Rocket asks, clambering up to perch on a fence post.

“Almost nightly,” Thor says. “Thank you for keeping it from the others.”

“But there's nothing here?” 

“Not yet,” he says, looking up at the farmhouse. “But I just get a feeling sometimes. That I'm not alone.” 

Loki, watching from the attic, could swear Thor looks right at him. He steps back from the window with a start.

The pair in the garden watch the tattered curtains in the attic window shift, perhaps in a breeze.

*

“So how come you bought a farm but don't know fuck all about farming?” Rosie asks while she mops, making like the floor near Thor's regular booth is particularly filthy. 

“My father was a very important man,” Thor says, into his third piece of cherry pie. “I had no obligation to learn such knowledge.”

“So like, you went to private school?”

“Yes, it was very private.”

“That tracks,” she says. 

“Though I'm sure my brother was no stranger to agriculture studies,” Thor says. “I paid far more attention on the training field.”

“You were a jock, and he was a nerd.”

“Certainly.”

“Well, you're much smarter than any of the boys I ever went with,” Rosie says, leaning on the mop handle.

Thor smiles. “I'm certain there are many who are eons smarter than I am. Things would have gone far differently the past few years were I a smarter man.”

“You still mopey about that Thanos guy?” She nudges him in the shoulder. “Come on, Thor, you saved the universe or whatever. Seems plenty smart to me.”

“Thank you, Lady Rosie,” he says. “I am lucky to have your confidence.”

“You seen your brother yet?” she asks. “I mean, if the ghost up there is your brother.”

“Only in dreams.” Thor takes a bite of crust and savors it in his mouth. Tammy really does make wonderful pie. The older woman motions to Rosie from the kitchen to get on with work and quit loitering near Thor. She scoots along to mop elsewhere, returning not long later to take Thor's empty plate.

“You want another?” Thor nods. He's retired. He can eat as much pie as he wants.

“My brother and I had a falling out not long before he died,” he says as she returns with another slice. 

“Was it bad?” Rosie asks.

“No, not really,” Thor says with a shrug. “We would have gotten over it given more time I think. He did kill a bunch of people and betray me many times, but I'm still a bit hazy on how much of that was his own doing.”

“Oh. Well that's good.”

“I also tazed him a bit the one time and didn't get to apologize for that,” he says. “Let me tell you, being tazed? Not ideal. And I can shoot lightning from my eyes.”

“I see.”

“So I worried that I may have just conjured up his ghost. Because of our unfinished business.”

“That could be.”

“But no, there is more to my dreams than that. There has to be.” And he can wait as long as it takes to make sense of them. He has all the time in the world.

Tammy gestures to Rosie again to get moving or else. 

“I hope you figure things out quick,” Rosie says as she goes back to cleaning up.

“Oh and please apologize to your mother for me,” he says, standing to leave. “I seem to have broken almost all of her very nice lamps.”

*

Thor dreams.

He stands alone in the empty, darkened living room. The stairs creak as he climbs them, hand skimming the dust on the railing. He has avoided the upper stories of the house in his waking hours for fear of their lack of stability. The floorboards groan ominously, but in dreams, they hold steady.

Vibrant red curtains billow from the windows on the second floor, not of Midgardian quality. The familiar fabric adorned many of the tall windows and archways of his childhood. During playful hiding games as a boy, he remembers the velveteen softness of them against his face, the tug of his brother's hand, fingers laced with his.

The attic stairs yawn, and Thor climbs them. Each step feels heavier than the next, and the stairs multiply, marching endlessly upward. The curtains stretch out and seem to tickle just so at his back no matter how far he climbs from them.

He cannot see Loki, but he knows he will find him at the top of the stairs, if only he can reach them. 

He moves as though through water. His eyes refuse to focus.

He hears the curtains snap in the breeze behind him, feels the soft breath of air against his neck. His vision shimmers, and the muscles in his legs lock up. He opens his mouth but cannot speak or shout.

He extends a hand toward the dark mouth at the top of the stairs.

Long, pale fingers intertwine with his and tug, and he is standing in the attic beside Loki.

“There you are,” he says. “I was looking for you.”

Their hands are still interlocked. 

“I'm here,” Loki says, gesturing with his free hand at the shadowed attic. “Where I've always been.”

“You haven't always been here,” Thor says. “You were once at my side through every hardship. Even to your death.”

“I don't remember,” Loki says. “I only remember here.”

“You're dead. Maybe you forgot.”

“I know I'm dead.”

“Do you remember dying?”

“No,” Loki says.

“You died at the hands of a tyrant. You sacrificed yourself so that I could live.”

“That doesn't sound like me.”

“How do you know?”

“I know me very well.”

“Loki,” Thor says. He feels no heat from his brother's hand, no beating pulse. If he could only hold on tight enough, perhaps he could drag him back with him. “Stay with me. Don't go.”

“I'm here,” Loki says, and the words echo. He remembers a quiet room held in a pocket of space. He remembers the stars spinning out away behind Loki's head.

His fingers are growing tired. He trembles.

“No,” he protests and holds tighter. The attic air grows closer, his lungs compressing. The floor tips. “No, stop, don't go. I've got you.”

He aches. His hand clenches but cannot keep its grip.

Loki falls away from him into a swirling expanse of nothingness.

Thor wakes to a pink dawn blushing across the walls of the living room, alone.

*

And so, Thor stays in the farmhouse on the hill and day by day lives into what he claimed to his friends: that he is retiring to be a farmer and he means to farm.

He begins by mending the fences surrounding the pasture and fixing up the weathered lean-to of a barn. The reason for this makes itself clear when a stock trailer backs up the drive, unloading a pair of old goats. 

The goats are small and pot-bellied with floppy ears and curling horns, and Loki soon becomes convinced that they possess even greater trickster magic than he does.

Thor is enamored with them. He sits for hours on the front stoop carving a little plaque with their names on it to hang on the wall of the lean-to. Each night, he beds the shelter down with straw and feeds them their dinner, and each morning, he wakes before the sun to toss hay and dump some grain in their buckets and lean on a fence post to watch them eat.

Though it's better than the barking dogs one of the last tenants kept, the pair still likes to stand close together at the gate and stare for unnervingly long amounts of time straight at Loki as they chew their cud, square pupils following him when he moves.

Even worse, Thor begins trying to teach them tricks, and Loki is forced to spend whole afternoons sitting cross-legged in the paddock watching the giant oaf of a man train a pair of goats to do things like stand on a bucket and wave their hooves about. 

It's an utterly ridiculous way to spend an afterlife. Even more ridiculous when they quickly take to the tricks and begin doing them unprompted to beg for snacks. With no discrimination between performing for mortals and performing for a certain malevolent house spirit.

“What do you see, my little friend?” Thor asks while one goat or another stares dead at Loki and waves its forehoof wildly. 

Dust motes spin in streams of light as Thor mucks out the lean-to in silence, and Loki stands nearly close enough to touch, imagining that if he concentrated hard enough he could smell manure and hay and sweat and spring air, imagining he could glimpse the stranger's thoughts.

Next, Thor begins repairing the dusty chicken coop around back. He returns one day from town with a whole gaggle of the creatures in wire cages, clucking disdainfully at being confined.

“Here you go, ladies,” Thor says as he releases them to their new home. He names them after Asgardian women he once knew. A fiesty nut-brown one he calls Sif, the one with soft grey down and a gentle coo he names Frigga, Freyja is an orange one with a sharp beak, Idunn is a peachy hen with dark stripes, and so on.

A little black and orange cat with amber eyes appears one day and takes up residence on the farm, often found sleeping in the little hay loft above the lean-to, peering down through the slats above. Thor calls the little cat Heimdall before Rosie informs him that most all cats of her color are females. The name sticks anyway.

Heimdall joins the goats in following Loki with her eyes, perched on a fence post or the porch railing and licking a paw as she does so. 

Thor furrows a garden into the front lawn, planting tomatoes and cucumbers and peppers and other crops the townsfolk give him to sow. He kneels in the dirt to talk to the seedlings, large hands gently patting fresh soil around them. He calls a gentle rain each day to water them, and tendrils curl up from the earth, buzzing with humming bees and wasps, flitting hawkmoths, gentle butterflies. His garden grows faster and fuller than any in town, needing careful staking and tending to keep the plants contained.

Perhaps they will call him a god of the fields in time, the god of vengeful thunder but a memory. 

And still, Loki notices, Thor's smile doesn't quite reach his eyes.

* 

Thor dreams.

Again, the attic stairs stretch, and he climbs them as they steepen and bend. They spiral into an endless loop, and he circles up and up, knowing what will wait for him when he reaches the top and opens the attic door. Finally, the door materializes in front of him, and he twists the knob with hands that feel detached from his body and steps into an Asgardian courtyard.

It is early summer, which he knows because the diminutive trees that line the courtyard in ornamental planters are in full bloom, spreading a warm scent. He forgets their name, though he knows Mother told him many times. He has yet to see or smell anything quite like them on Midgard.

Tall pillars line the open courtyard, and beyond, the halls are empty. No bustle of crowds coming and going, though in his memory this place was a crossroads of activity. Often, musicians practiced in the sunny courtyard and young girls gathered in the stone alcoves to gossip and old warriors sat on carved benches to rest their bones, while Asgardians flitted down the halls going about their daily lives.

A small staircase leads up out of the courtyard. Thor's footsteps on cold stone echo in the empty halls. 

He finds Loki standing on one of the balconies that juts out from the hallway, long curtains draping down from the pillared archway. Below, other balconies and courtyards terrace away from them, giving way to house roofs in the lower town, and in the distance, a glint of sunlight off the sea.

Loki wears dark leather limned with gold, a circlet resting low on his forehead, laced with fine chain that is braided down into his dark hair. Plum-colored bruises mottle along his pale throat. He does not look at Thor but out at Asgard below or perhaps somewhere more distant.

“Brother,” Thor says.

“Is that so?” 

“You will remember in time.” Thor steps beside Loki, leaning on the railing. “I thought I would never see this place again except like this. In dreams. And yet, I was here just recently. Really here.”

“Where is here?” Loki asks. He doesn't look at Thor, a frown creasing his forehead.

“Home,” Thor says. “We grew up here together.”

“It's very beautiful.”

“It's gone now. Just space dust.”

“Ah, I'm sorry to hear that,” Loki says. The sun begins to sink, faster than it had in Thor's memory. The clouds scatter, and the shadows tip, shimmering away from them.

“I couldn't look at you,” Thor says. “When I was here last. I knew just where you were in the time we came to and yet I couldn't look. I don't know what I would have done if I had seen you.”

“You say such peculiar things,” Loki says.

“Well, this is a dream. It's meant to be peculiar.”

“You don't really still believe this is just a dream?”

“No,” Thor says. “No, I don't.”

The sunset glows ochre over the streets and buildings, the light waning, and then suddenly, Asgard dissolves and they are again standing in the attic of the farmhouse. Loki blurs around the edges and then solidifies, looking as he did when he died, soot and sweat gleaming on his grey skin.

“There you are,” Thor says. “I was looking for you.” 

He reaches for Loki, maybe to clasp a hand on his neck like he had so often in the past, and Loki flinches, jerking away.

“I don't know you,” Loki says. “I am not your ghost.”

“You are, you're real and you're in the farmhouse, if I could just find a way to reach you--”

“Stop trying. Leave me be.”

“Brother--”

“Go,” Loki says, and it's as if a great fist punches him backward with explosive force through empty space. He falls or floats through a black void, delirious, the explosion still ringing in his ears, no air in his lungs and ice creeping over his skin, so cold, and the stars spinning around and below him, the crags of debris from the ship and Loki-- Loki.

He wakes with a gasp in the quiet living room, his lungs burning, and Loki is standing between the front windows.

“Well,” Loki says with a drawn-out sigh. “Now this complicates things.”

*

“You're real.”

“Yes.”

“You're really here.”

“Yes, yes.”

“I can see you and I'm not sleeping and you're here.”

“ _Yes_.”

“You're a ghost?”

“I suppose so.”

“And you still don't know who I am and would like me to leave?”

“Yes to all of that.”

“No.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I won't leave. Not now.”

“I can make your time here unbearable.”

“Try me.” 

“Very well,” Loki says as his eyes taking on a dangerous gleam. “You've brought this on yourself.”

And he flickers out of sight, leaving Thor slouched in his armchair in the thin, dawn light.

*

Thor makes a call in the parking lot of the filling station, leaning on the bed of his truck.

“Banner,” he says when the man picks up the phone. “I have something to tell you, but you have to promise me not to assume I have lost my faculties.”

“I can't really promise that, buddy.”

“Fine,” Thor says. “But promise you won't rush here before I finish.”

“Sure, ok.”

“I wasn't wholly truthful about the reason I came here,” he says. “Ever since the defeat of Thanos I have had certain dreams. Dreams of my brother in this same farmhouse. Before I even knew it existed.”

“Ok, that's kinda spooky,” Banner says. “So why explain this now?”

“I finally saw him, Banner. Not in dreams. Loki was there.”

“Actual in the flesh Loki?”

“Not in the flesh, no. He appears to be non-corporeal.”

“In a magical illusion way or in a Casper the friendly ghost way?”

“That allusion escapes me, and I would not call him friendly.”

“A hostile ghost? Man, are you in danger?”

“Perhaps the only danger is to my ego. He is up to his old trickster ways. It's rather reminiscent of our childhood on Asgard, actually.”

“What, did he switch your shampoo with pink hair dye or something?”

“Purple.”

“Oh.”

His hair still has a violet tinge despite his best attempts to remove the color.

“Also, he keeps misplacing my rolls of toilet paper.”

“.... oh.”

Loki had started small on the haunting, smashing the last of the very ugly lamps while Thor was in the room, sprawled in his armchair dozing. 

“That was a very nice lamp,” he had said after startling awake.

He soon had found his farming equipment going frequently missing, only to reappear in increasingly odd places. A hoe balanced upright on the porch roof, a muck rake halfway up a tree, a trowel in the freezer. His furniture had shifted on occasion, sometimes stacked on one another. And the back door had been left open at night, leading to a family of raccoons briefly taking residence in the kitchen cabinets.

“We spoke briefly,” Thor says. “He has no memory of me or what happened to him.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Nothing. And he's trying his hardest to get me to give up on him.”

“You're not going to give up though, are you?”

Thor laughs, a booming sound that startles some of the other patrons refueling and the gas station attendant.

“Banner, if you believe I would even consider it, then you do not know me at all.”

“And I assume you have a reason for telling me this?”

“Have you heard of anything like this happening elsewhere? What would cause him to return in this fashion?” Thor asks.

“I don't know, man,” Banner says. “Maybe it's something Loki did before he died.”

“Maybe. I wouldn't put it past my brother to find a way to survive.”

“Or it could have been the gauntlet. Thanos only had the Power and Space stones, but who knows what even two infinity stones could do.”

“It was a year ago that I first began to dream of Loki here. Just after we righted things.”

“Maybe the second snap undid more than just the snap itself?”

“But then, how do I fix it? How do I make him whole again?”

“I'm sorry, Thor, I'm feeling a little out of my depth here. I would have said ghosts were pretty much an impossibility not too long ago. I'd have said that the dead--”

“That the dead stay dead, yes. We both know it isn't that simple.”

“Yeah,” Banner says with a sigh. “But why Loki and not others? Why not more people who died on that ship? Why not Heimdall? Why not any of the millions that Thanos wiped out before?”

“Only the Norns know,” Thor says. “Perhaps it isn't fair. For me to have my brother back while others yet mourn.”

“I don't think life's about fairness, buddy. Otherwise none of this would have gone down at all.” A silence stretches, and Thor imagines Banner, big and green and slumped in a chair that seems far too small for him with the little phone cupped in his hand. “I'll look into it for you,” he says finally. “I'll let you know if I find anything.”

“Thank you, Banner,” Thor says. “I'm glad that we spoke.”

He hangs up and leaves the filling station for the diner, slipping into his usual booth.

Rosie brings him a slice of strawberry rhubarb pie without having to be asked, though Thor finds he doesn't have much of an appetite.

“Something wrong, boss?” she asks, hand on her hip. “Besides the terrible box dye?”

“I saw him,” he says. “I saw my brother.”

“Oh dang,” she says and slips into the booth across from him. Tammy glares pointedly from the kitchen, but Rosie chooses to ignore her. “What happened?”

“He is trying to drive me out,” Thor says. “He doesn't remember and seems not to want to remember.”

“Shit, that's wild,” Rosie says. “What are you going to do?”

“What I always have done in regard to him,” Thor says. “Refuse to listen.”

*

It goes on for weeks with no change. Sometimes Thor catches a glimpse or two of Loki. Standing in the attic window when he pulls into the drive. Leaning on the fence to watch him muck the lean-to. A grey shadow perched on the couch when he happens to wake late at night.

Banner calls, says he hasn't found anything helpful, hasn't heard of anyone else who mysteriously came back as a ghost.

The frustration sinks in on both ends, Loki's tricks escalating until they take on a more dangerous edge. Knives fling loose from the knife block. Set mousetraps appear overnight at his feet. His pitchfork takes on a menacing life of its own.

Loki is so _close_ that Thor's skin itches. Even when he can't see him, his presence is palpable, like an invisible but solid mass of something decidedly _Loki_. He feels it in his chest and in the hair that rises on the back of his neck. Thor stares pointedly for hours at where he thinks Loki must be standing, refusing to look away. 

If he just stares hard enough, if he just hopes long enough and is stubborn and patient and determined enough, then maybe he can will Loki back to visibility. With true force of will, maybe even back to life.

It's a warm summer evening on the farm when his patience finally pays off, Loki flickering into view before him on the porch. His hair curls long and dark against his shoulders, and his neck is a clean expanse of pale skin, no bruises.

“Well you're nothing if not stubborn,” Loki says, finally.

“I told you,” Thor says, standing from his rocking chair. “I won't leave. Not now.”

“Why?” Loki's brows creases, his mouth tightens.

“For the same reason you stayed your hand,” Thor says. Loki bristles.

“I did no such--”

“If you really wished to harm me, you could have. If you really wished to force me out, you could have set all my food to spoil, forced the well to dry, kept me sleepless and on edge and tortured me.”

“Yes,” says Loki. Though a breeze slips off the pasture, it does not touch his hair or clothing. “I stayed my hand.”

“Why?” Thor asks. “Why, brother?”

“I'm not your brother,” he says, though there is less conviction in his voice now. “I'm not him. Or at least, I'm not anymore.”

“You _are_ ,” says Thor. “I will not leave until you know it to be true. And likely not even then.”

And Thor reaches for him, and the skin of Loki's neck that his hand caresses is solid and present. 

It startles them both enough that Thor begins to draw his hand back and Loki jerks his hand up to still his arm. 

His fingers curl firmly around Thor's forearm.

“H-how?” Loki stutters and flexes his grip. Thor's thumb skims along the line of his throat. No pulse jumps there, and the skin seems to give off no heat. The evening breeze still does not stir his dark hair. 

He is not _alive_ , but Thor will take whatever small piece of Loki he is given, even if he truly has lost his faculties, if the past few months have been only an elaborate delusion, if in truth, he stands now on the porch alone, and any one wandering past would see him grasping at nothing, Thor will take it, _he will take it_. 

And then, perhaps, demand more.

Emboldened, Thor closes the last of the distance between them and draws Loki into an embrace.

Their bodies fold close together, Loki's arms curled up around his back and hands clasped at his shoulders, cheek pressed to Thor's cheek and Thor gripping back just as tightly, one hand in Loki's hair, one around his waist. Their ears skid past each other and Thor's beard rubs on Loki's jaw, and it almost hurts, no, it _does_ hurt. 

Mostly in his chest right behind his ribs and also low in his stomach. Loki is here. Loki is right here.

Thor laughs into Loki's hair and draws back a moment to look at him. Tears track down Loki's face, though he seems to be stubbornly refusing to give into crying, his jaw set and shoulders quivering.

“Why the long face?” Thor jokes, grinning, though the crack in his voice belies his own emotion.

“Shut up,” he says and grimaces, drawing Thor close again. “It's not as if I remember anything, you prat. Just can't say I remember the last time I felt anything. Can't remember much at all.”

Thor strokes a hand down Loki's back. His whole body is shaking now, giving into the sobs.

“I remember,” Thor says, his voice a whisper so tender it jerks a more audible sob from his brother. “You are Loki.”

The sun is an orange fire setting over the pasture, the goats two dark silhouettes in the distance, the horizon aflame.

“Prince of Asgard.”

He remembers the gleam of a city that is long blown to dust. He remembers his brother riding beside him into battle. The laughter of their friends.

“Odinson...”

He remembers the glittering throne room and an ocean cliffside flickering with storms.

“The rightful king of Jotunheim.” 

He remembers the winter. A frozen plane cleaving between them, and frost spreading deep.

“God of mischief.”

He remembers a millennia of looking for the devious glint in his brother's eyes to signal the start of one trouble or another. 

“And my brother.”

He remembers the Statesman, Loki beside him along a cold bank of windows looking out over the swirling stars. The tentative tendrils of hope that something so broken between them could yet be mended. It was so few years at odds, after all, for all the many centuries side by side.

How different it is now, on the porch of the farmhouse as the sun sets. How very the same.

Thor pulls away to rest their foreheads together. He wipes his thumb across the tear tracks on Loki's cheeks. He has stopped crying and holds very still, rapt with the words that Thor speaks.

“I watched you die and return more times than I can count, and I do not believe I will lose you this time. I refuse to believe it,” Thor says, and he leans forward to tilt their mouths together, at long last.

A night wind slips their hair into their faces, cool and sweet-smelling, and Loki kisses him back with all the desperate longing of someone who has wanted to do so for hundreds of years.

And he remembers.

And his heart leaps in his chest.

*  
It's a beautiful afternoon. 

The heavily-laden tables shoved together on the front lawn could rival any feast spread in all of Asgard's history. The chairs are mismatched and the table cloths as well, checkerboard and floral and pale linen.

All of them gather together, the mismatched lot of them, or at least the ones that could be rounded up at such short notice for a picnic dinner in the middle of nowhere.

Thor had thought it better to leave the reason for their celebration off the impromptu invitation, but Loki had convinced him that may not be so wise.

Banner shows up with a 'WELCOME HOME, LOKI' sign that he helps stretch across the front porch of the farmhouse. Valkyrie brings a few dozen barrels of Norwegian spirits and a number of Asgardians with Korg and Miek in tow. Darcy and Jane and Erik come with party poppers and sparklers and fireworks, and Tammy and Rosie from the diner bring a whole selection of homemade pie. The Guardians of the Galaxy show up late with the addition of a space pirate in handcuffs they'd caught smuggling on the way over. He turns out to be very skilled at card tricks.

Loki slinks along the edges of the activities, trying to stay mostly out of sight, watching Thor get into increasingly inebriated antics. The invitations and the banners may say his name, but this is truly Thor's celebration. 

Thor mostly lets him do so, only occasionally breaking away from the activity to slap an arm around his shoulders or sweep Loki off his feet and twirl him about gleefully in a manner that is highly embarrassing. The sheer joy on Thor's round face as he sets him down is the only thing that keeps him from serious injury in retaliation.

The lot of them eat and drink together as the afternoon slips into evening and then dusk, and the stars rise over the farmhouse and then, sprays of fireworks.

“Stay with me,” Thor says to Loki, in the quiet between the next round of explosions.

“As long as you'll have me,” Loki says, leaning into him as an ascending firework illuminates his face. “I'm here.”

*

“The thing I still don't understand,” Thor says as they lie together in the shade of the orchard. The summer heat wafts in shimmering waves off the pasture, but here in the grass under the trees, it is cool and still. A blue sky swings sparse clouds overhead. “Why this farmhouse? Why did your spirit appear here?”

“I really can't say,” Loki says. “I couldn't have returned to the Statesman where I died. Maybe something significant occurred here long ago?”

“Maybe,” Thor says. “The sun will shine on us again, you said. Perhaps the Norns know something we don't.”

“About what?” Loki asks, pushing himself up on his elbows.

Thor looks at him, at the dappled light through the peach trees, the bright ripples of sun across his body. He reaches to touch, afraid for a moment that his hand will go right through, but Loki's skin is warm and solid.

“About sunshine.”

**Author's Note:**

> i'm on tumblr as @limerental
> 
> i wrote this purely for the visual of hillbilly!thor ngl


End file.
